Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

A CONTROVERSIAL GENIUSYou don’t have to be tech savvy to enjoy Steve Jobs, the fascinating biography by Walter Isaacson that is out in paperback this month, two years after the release of the best-selling hardcover. Jobs, who grew up in California, got his start at Atari in the early 1970s and co-founded Apple in 1976. He spent nine years there, resigned, and then helped transform Pixar...

Feature by Robert Reid

Robert Reid is the U.S. Travel Editor for Lonely Planet. In a column written exclusively for BookPage, he highlights terrific travel books, both old and new. This month, he selects some of the best books for choosing your 2013 destinations. Every year Lonely Planet’s world-traipsing authors and editors produce travel recommendations for the year to come, and this year is no exception...

The sweet sounds of Chabon's California epic

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon hits close to home—literally—with his first novel in five years. In Telegraph Avenue, he brings readers to his very own California East Bay Neighborhood, “Brokeland” (it’s located where Berkeley and Oakland meet up), in the year 2004.Longtime friends and record-store owning partners Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe could...

The amazing imagination of Michael Chabon

Alternative history is usually a simple, if tantalizing affair. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if the Nazis had prevailed in World War II? What if America and its allies won WWII, but the fledgling Israeli nation was crushed in the Middle East and relocated to the hinterlands of Alaska? What was that last idea, you ask? It's the premise of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael...

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay returns with an old-fashioned whodunit inspired by the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Indeed, Chabon's book features a retired detective referred to throughout as the old man who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sherlock Holmes and whom the reader must assume is none other than the sleuth himself. Now 89,...

An encore for Sherlock Holmes

Considering its relatively slim profile, there's an awful lot packed into Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon's latest novel, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. Though on the surface it's a lighthearted, old-fashioned mystery, the thrill of solving puzzles is the least of its many themes. There's also the importance and the difficulty of navigating old age with grace and dignity....

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

The month of September offers excellent fiction titles for reading groups. BookPage's selections, all newly published in paperback, are listed below.The Blind AssassinBy Margaret AtwoodThis Booker Prize-winning novel blends elements of romance, suspense and - believe it or not - science fiction into what may be Atwood's most original work yet. Opening the narrative is '40s socialite...

Super and less-than-superheroes: a talk with the amazing Chabon

Superhuman strength, x-ray vision, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound -- Superman's got it all, believes author Michael Chabon. But if Chabon were a comic book superhero himself, he thinks he would have been "one of the also-rans. There's Daredevil, who was blind; Hour Man, who had his powers for an hour; Bouncing Boy...